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Greek Chicken and Orzo

Let me start off by saying this is by no means a crock pot meal. ..and I wish I had known this before the whole process. This recipe I got from my crockpot cook book and I have been eyeing it for a while because it looked so good and so I finally decided to make it. What it called for was:

green bell peppers cut into thin strips

onion chopped

chicken thighs

oregano, rosemary, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper

orzo

lemon juice and the peel

crumbled feta cheese

So then what you do is coat your crockpot with cooking spray and add the peppers and onion. Meanwhile heat olive oil in a pan on the stove and quickly just brown your chicken on both sides like so:

Once the chickens have a nice gold color on them, remove them from the pan and sprinkle on the spices- oregano, rosemary, garlic, salt, and pepper. Then lay your chickens on top of the peppers and onions in the crock pot and let cook on low for 6 hours:

At this point I was already getting nervous because I think that is a very long time to cook chicken for without it getting dry–but I continued on. When my timer went off I removed the chicken and then followed directions to turn the crockpot on high, add my orzo, add the lemon juice and grated peel, and then a 1/2 cup of water. Then you are supposed to place the chicken back on top and cook for 30 minutes this time. Okay–bizarre—how is this chicken not going to become cardboard?

While this was all going on, I made a beautiful greek salad with tomatoes, onion, scallions, cucumber, feta, avocado, and iceberg lettuce with greek dressing:

Finally my greek chicken was ready. I took out the chicken, stirred up the orzo with the onions and peppers, placed it on a plate, layed the chicken on top, added feta cheese, and put chopped fresh parsley on top.

Then I made my self a huge glass of milk, set up my tv tray ( I had no guest- but this turned out to be a really good thing), feeling pretty proud because it looked good and I was trying to stay positive…and then I took my first bite. Hmm okay…so not so bad, chicken was dry like I was afraid of, but seasoning was good and lemon really added a lot of flavor to the orzo…staying in the game with this meal… so then kept eating, and then a few bites later the orzo literally starts to harden forming clumps on my plate. It was like turning into cement. It was disgusting. If I had made this a few weeks early I could have seriously thrown it on my ceiling to stop that ridiculous leak -it was that bad.

So back to my point- this meal has so much potential to be good – but without the use of a crock pot. The way to do it is just cook the chicken on the stove top and cook the orzo separately.